Work was crazy today. We played "Ship It or Sit On It" today with the new capacitor bank control software. Everyone was desperate to wring this thing out and test the living hell out of it. Our reputations are on the line and the software is late. Nobody wants to be embarassed. Electrical utilities are ferocious customers. They don't like to be embarassed either, so we do our damnedest not to give them anything to gripe about. Everybody had one more idea for torturing my software to see if they could break it. We did find a very very obscure bug in our SCADA system communications protocol but it's impact is so very minor an irritation, and it manifests under such rare and unusual circumstances, we decided to put the thing on the fix list for the next revision. I can live with that. It is incredibly old, but none of our customers has ever discovered it. We found it just by purest fluke of malicious testing. Gah, this project has exhausted me, but finally, as of 4:30 PM this afternoon, it shipped!
After work, I met Robert, Tom, and Don for dinner. Jims, a local Alameda restaurant where we like to meet and have chilli, was closed this evening, so we walked down the street to this Viet Namese place. We holed up in there and discussed setting up our board of directors. We're putting it together. As the primary and majority stockholders in TNAOS, we elected ourselves to the board of directors. We also elected ourselves chief cooks and bottle-washers. Things may be starting to move. Our patent lawyer actually is eager to see us again. The sheer amount of time our patent attourney devotes to setting us up with a deal is amazing, considering that his time is valued quite highly and he is not billing us for it. I am truly encouraged. We're getting ready to set up another trip to Palo Alto to see him. Robert has also found an interesting contact while taking his daughter to acting class. Apparently, this guy arranges business loans. When Robert told him what we are up to, he suggested that a friend of his would be more than interested in talking with us and certainly would have the disposable capital to back us if we convinced him we are onto something. I am hoping.
